Eideard

A care home has apologised and altered its policy after charging a grieving daughter more than £3,000 for “access” to her father’s room following his death.

Sue Cann branded the fee “daylight robbery” after finding her father Kenneth’s nursing home contract required four weeks notice in the event of a resident “passing away”. The 54-year-old described her treatment by Highcliffe Nursing Home in Christchurch, Dorset, where Mr Cann lived for 17 months, as “callous” and “ridiculous”.

She said she understood an additional tariff was justified to allow the care home time to arrange a new tenant, but that a month’s fee was too much. It was only after she paid the substantial figure that officials at the home agreed to reduce their notice period to seven days, in line with most other UK care homes.

Miss Cann said: “When the letter came I was so shocked about it. My father had to give 28 days notice for moving or passing away…But how on earth can you do that? Nobody knows when they are going to die. It’s ridiculous. To pay for a month which covers his food, laundry and nursing care is daylight robbery.”

Mr Cann, who spent 42 years working as a service manager for British Gas, lived with wife, Winnie, until March last year when she died aged 74 from ovarian cancer. Soon after he was admitted to Highcliffe Nursing Home, run by Suffolk-based Kingsley Healthcare, but he passed away following a long battle with dementia on January 30.

Mr Cann, who had worked hard to save for his retirement, ended up spending £63,000 for the duration of his time at the home…

“I wouldn’t mind paying for a week but I really object to a whole month. His belongings were removed from the home on the evening of his death as far as I’m aware.

Yesterday, a spokesman for Kingsley Healthcare said following a review the company’s notice period for death had been changed from 28 to seven days.

Following a review – and the stink in the press and online about their greedy, moneygrubbing policies.

The chief executive of the company behind mobile gaming phenomenon, Angry Birds, has said that piracy helps companies attract more business.

Talking at the annual Midem music conference, in Cannes today, Mikael Hed, the chief executive of Rovio, said: “Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day.”

He admitted that the games company, which is based in Finland and experienced huge success with the Angry Birds brand, learned from the music industry’s mistakes when thinking about how to deal with piracy…

“We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy…”

Hed told Midem delegates that it was futile to pursue people who copy Angry Birds’ games and concepts unless they were harmful to the brand reported The Guardian. He said that he sees any type of piracy as being helpful to the brand in attracting new fans.

Not anything that serious geeks haven’t been discussing – and agreeing with – for years. The failure of the music and movie moguls to understand the Web and digital communications started this discussion – even before piracy became significant. They get the prize for dumb greed when it comes to dealing with intellectual property, anyway. Mostly for screwing creative artists all along.

The financial markets need regulation the way a nuclear-power plant needs a cooling agent for its radioactive fuel rods. If safety rules are enforced and the heat of the rods is properly controlled, the result can be clean, abundant energy. But if that cooling process is neglected, there could be a meltdown.

Similarly, capital requirements are the cooling agent of risk-taking in the economy. And just as nuclear fuel will always be reactive, people will always be greedy. We need to enforce rules to balance natural greed with capital requirements so that greed can create productive risk-taking and competition — not short-term extraction. Here are five possible ways to do that.

Make Swaps Public: In Las Vegas, you need to have actual money to gamble — your own money — and if you lose, you pay. But since 2000, banks, industries and consumers have been free to take on system-threatening levels of debt (to the point of financial meltdown) without facing any requirement to risk a significant amount of their own money…

To end this insanity, the American people must demand an end to the anachronistic “dark market” for credit insurance, or swaps, and insist that they be moved to an exchange where the risks that we all now bear can be visible to all. All trades on the exchange must be required to meet capital requirements (or some equivalent inhibitor of risk) to stop this reckless behavior for good…

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In the latest example of a corporation trying to nickel and dime its customers, the telecom giant has announced a new “$2 payment convenience fee” for people who, well, want to pay their bill.

Basically if you are the kind of person who can’t commit to auto-paying your phone bill and like to pay online or on your phone, well, your bill is going to be going up two bucks a month starting on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, January 15.

Yeah, there are ways to go month-to-month without incurring the fee—electronic check, a Verizon gift card, paper check in the mail, or paying in person at a Verizon store — but if you want to pay your bill online or on your phone, well, be ready to part with two hundred pennies.

So, why is Verizon doing this? According to Big Red, “The fee will help allow us to continue to support these single bill payment options in these channels [the still free options] and is designed to address costs incurred by us for only those customers who choose to make single bill payments in alternate payment channels (online, mobile, telephone).”

So…basically Verizon (which is not exactly in the poor house) found a place where they could wring out a few extra pennies and is doing just that. What comes after this? Fees for accessing more than 100 cell towers in a month?

Methinks they’re trying to sneak in the backdoor on transaction fees like those charged merchants by credit card companies. However it turns out, this is just one more example of special privileges afforded telcos. If your state or city tried to impose a tax like this every so-called taxpayer organization would rise up in arms [especially those already carrying guns].

UPDATE: Verizon caved. Ain’t the internet something?

David Camm — Keith Henderson

If former Indiana state Trooper David Camm is tried a third time in the murders of his wife and their two children, Floyd County Prosecutor Keith Henderson should not be involved, an Indiana appeals court has ruled.

The unanimous, three-judge panel ruled that a special prosecutor should replace Henderson because he entered a book deal to write about the case while Camm’s second conviction was being appealed.

The panel called that deal, which has since been canceled, “an irreversible, actual conflict of interest with his duty to the people of the state of Indiana…”

Camm was convicted twice of murdering his wife, Kimberly Camm, their 7-year-old son, Bradley, and 5-year-old daughter, Jill, in the garage of their home near Georgetown in September 2000. Both convictions were overturned because prosecutors used impermissible evidence or arguments.

In June 2009, while the Indiana Supreme Court was weighing Camm’s appeal of the second conviction, Henderson reached an agreement with Berkley Penguin Group to write a book about the case…

He and a co-author split a $3,400 advance and promised to deliver the manuscript by Aug. 1, 2009, court records show. But just days after Henderson entered into the contract, the state high court overturned the conviction.

Though Penguin canceled the contract, Uliana filed a motion with Special Judge Jonathan Dartt in December 2009 asking that Henderson be replaced by a special prosecutor if a third trial were to be held.

Looks like Penguin has more sense than the DA or the political hacks who had endorsed his continued presence as prosecutor. What an egregious creep!

He knows what we’ve done even if Rohrabacher doesn’t care

The U.S. Embassy in Iraq is distancing itself from statements made by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher that led to a government spokesman saying the congressman and his delegation are not welcome in the country…

Dana Rohrabacher, the chairman of the Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee…told reporters during a news conference at the embassy in Baghdad that he suggested Iraq repay some of the cost of the war.

“Once Iraq becomes a very rich and prosperous country … we would hope that some consideration be given to repaying the United States some of the mega-dollars that we have spent here in the last eight years,” said Rohrabacher, according to the Agence France-Presse news agency…

It was unclear whether the U.S. Embassy recorded the news conference. It did not make any video or audio recordings of Rohrabacher’s statements available to the media…

“We have contacted the U.S. Embassy and they said the remarks of Congressman Dana Rohrabacher expressed his own opinion and not the official opinion of the United States,” the spokesman said…

Traveling with Rohrabacher were Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan of Missouri; Rep. Ted Poe of Texas, a Republican member of Rohrabacher’s subcommittee; Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina; Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas; and Democratic Rep. Jim Costa of California.

Telephone calls to the district and Washington offices of all five congressmen were either not answered or not immediately returned.

Once again, the world gets a clear vision of the worst in American foreign policy. Guided by imperial greed, the stink of military power put to tasks benefitting the Oil Patch Boys above all else, Rohrabacher emphasizes his role as spokesman for the most reactionary, power-hungry thugs in Congress.

Click photo for video – about 9 minutes long. Sorry for the commercial.

John Taylor visited CNBC the other morning to discuss currency trading – a topic guaranteed to give you an ulcer if you do it for a living – or bore you into a greenback coma.

As an ingredient of his analysis, he makes the point that the Republican Party is using their majority in the House of Representatives to send our economy into another recession. We have left the boundaries of the Great Recession caused essentially by greedy investment banks and criminal mortgage procedures – aided by Republican policies obscuring and inhibiting oversight. They have decided to trigger another – deliberately.

He says this is a strategy decision by the Republican Party. Cause another recession – blame the Democrats and President Obama for it. Run for office as the alternative which will save the world.

I wonder if the Democrats and Obama have enough smarts, enough power to prevent this from happening?

Republicans have always hated Medicare, but most Americans have always loved it. Now, led by Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republicans are trying to kill it once and for all.

When JFK and LBJ proposed and passed it, Ronald Reagan called Medicare socialism and warned that it would lead to the end of freedom. If Medicare passed, the Gipper said, “… one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

A half-century after Reagan’s dire warning, I suspect most Americans see Medicare — the single-payer health system that covers seniors — as an essential element of our freedom. But not Congressman Ryan, nor many other Republicans. Ryan would end Medicare as we know it, replacing it with a voucher that seniors would take to insurance companies, upon whose tender mercies their lives and health would then depend…

There is no doubt that Mr. Ryan is bright. He is also engaging and charming. But forgive me if I fail to see the courage in a young and privileged man harming the most vulnerable while rewarding the most wealthy. Born to a family whose 125-year-old corporation boasts that it is “one of the nation’s largest site-work contractors,” Mr. Ryan won the genetic lottery. There is no doubt that his great-grandfather worked hard to build that company. But a century and a quarter later, young Mr. Ryan — who estimates his net worth at up to $2.4 million — has no calluses on his hands. Just on his heart.

The question for Republicans is, will they follow Ryan’s plan? The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says that under Ryan’s plan, “most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would under the current Medicare system.”

A lot more. In fact, under Medicare, a 65-year-old would pay just 25% of the total cost of her or his health care coverage.

Under the Ryan Republican plan, that jumps to 68%. (Individuals currently 55 or older would not be affected by the changes.)

If Republicans follow Ryan like lemmings, they should not be surprised when they find they’ve taken a firm step into thin air. Back in 1995, Newt Gingrich virtually assured President Bill Clinton’s re-election by proposing $270 billion in cuts to Medicare…

Clinton’s defense of Medicare was so central to his re-election that the word “Medicare” appears 49 times in his two debates with Sen. Bob Dole…

Medicare – like Social Security – is a single payer system that is run by our federal government at an efficiency rate about 4 times better than the average corporation. The cost of management for either socially-beneficial plan is less than 4% of the operating budget. American corporations think they’re mean and lean if they get down to 16%. Insurance companies? Well, they don’t even pretend to be mean and lean.

They don’t need it anymore than do the oil companies.

The Supreme Court has declined to review a ruling that reinstated an antitrust lawsuit alleging major record labels conspired to fix prices and terms under which music would be sold over the Internet.

The justices rejected without comment an appeal by a number of companies that included Sony Corp, a unit of Vivendi SA, Warner Music Group Corp and EMI Group of the ruling by a U.S. appeals Court in New York.

The heart and soul of the RIAA corporate kingdom.

The appeals court ruled that a federal judge had erred in 2008 in dismissing the lawsuit filed on behalf of people who downloaded music over the Internet. They had sued record labels that control more than 80 percent of U.S. digital music sales.

The lawsuit accused the record companies of agreeing to the wholesale price floor of about 70 cents a song when rivals began offering music on the Internet at a much cheaper rate.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor recused themselves and did not consider the case.

Happened to hear this, this morning, on one of our local country[ish] radio stations. Hadn’t heard it in a spell.

Woody’s son, Arlo, still has one of Woody’s guitars that says “This machine kills fascists” – which is about the best thing about the kind of music I sang and played back in the day. Woody was an inspiration to us all.

So, if you have a friend who is a modern-day Christian American Republican, play this song for them and ask whether or not this kind of Christianity is too old-fashioned for them?